(7-12 step 1):
Today I plan to finish the rudder!! All that's left is the
counterbalance. This is a piece of lead about 1/2"x3"x5" (or so)
and mounts to the top front of the rudder. It basically makes the
rudder equally weighted in front of, and behind the pivot axis.
I'm sure there's a more technical explination for it, but that's my
story and I'm stickin' to it! Well, in order to mount this thing,
you temporarily mount it in it's location, and then slightly bend the
skins around it by hand to mark the location of where the bend needs to
be. After that, you pull the clecoes out of the skin holes and
then using some blocks of wood clamped to the skin for protection you
bend the skins about 90 degrees so that they meet. After that you
remove the wood and pull the skins tight and overlap them as they would
be at final installation and tape them in place. Since there were
no predrilled holes for closing these pieces, that's the point of doing
this. There are mounting holes in the weight, and in the ribs on
the rudder, but you need to locate them on the skins. So, I laid
down the rudder with the counterweight on the floor, and per the plans,
inserted a drill bit through the mounting holes and tapped it with a
hammer to mark the location of the holes on the back side of the
skin. After doing this through both mounting holes, I untaped the
skins, peeled the one with the marks on it back, and drilled the holes
at the marks. This took care of one skin. Now I had to tape
the skins back in place (the one with the hole on the outside this
time) and use that hole as a guide to drill through the second
skin. Once that was done I got to final drill to size all the way
through the mounting holes (the skins, the counterweight, and the
ribs) Tell me Cessna goes through this amount of custom fitting!!!
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(7-12 step 3): The
only thing left to do was dimple the skins for the countersunk screws,
countersink the lead weight to accept the dimples in the skins and
finally install the hardware. Here's a shot of the finished
product! The plans indicate if you close the skins up over the
counterbalance and the outer skin buldges between the two screws, you
can place another screw in between. Our skins laid flat.
Also, one other thing... since this is another place where the skins
overlap, we needed to put some sort of protection on the skin
underneath. I had just picked up our Alodine 1132 pen, so I used
it for the first time here. So now... YES! We're DONE WITH
THE RUDDER!! (There's a picture of the finished product on
tomorrow's page)
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(8-7 step 3):
While I was 'painstakingly' finishing up the rudder Angela moved
on to the next step on the horizontal stabilizer which was to debur the
nose ribs and flute them if needed. She wound up having to flute
the forward portion of each of them. ( I made two attempts to
explain fluting as I was typing this... I gave up and wrote this
instead :-)
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Two of the nose ribs will have
the elevator trim cables run through them. Our plane will have
electric trim for the elevator (the Cessnas we flew didn't even have
this!) Angela messured out the location of the holes and then
used the drill press and a unibit to 'rough them in'.
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After roughly drilling out the
holes, she then used a dremel tool to grind away the remaining metal to
the final shape. She's getting us pretty close to a point where
we'll be forced to prime some parts before we can go any
further… I better finish up the vertical stabilizer!!
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